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was far too frightened by impending motherhood to greet him with much joy.
    But just a few years later, now married – and to a private surgeon, no less – Jack’s arrival had been everything Ricky’s was not. Everything had seemed perfect, from conception to birth to beyond. There had been none of the crippling depression that had sunk her after Ricky and even the labour had been a breeze, after a glowing pregnancy with no sickness and only the cutest of baby bumps.
    Sometimes she would lean over Jack's cot and watch him sleeping, her heart close to bursting with love. Only along with that rush of love for her child would come a creeping fear that she tried resolutely to swallow down, but that would stick in her chest undigested: the fear that she would lose him; that such perfection was too good to be true. Although her mother had reassured her that it was normal, that she herself had been so scared her babies would cease breathing in their sleep she had stayed awake for hours, Lucy looking back knew better. She should have known; should have never let him out of her sight for even a second. Should should should. Surely the cruellest word in the English language.
    The guilt had crippled her for the first few years, weighing her down like the pressing of stones, a crushing yet excruciatingly slow death. Everyone told her it wasn’t her fault. Everyone except her loving husband of course, whose eyes were full of unspoken accusations. Everyone except her mother-in-law, who grieved copiously and loudly but never had a kind word for Lucy. But then she had never liked her, had always wondered – quite often aloud – what her clever and handsome son had seen in a teenage single mother. The atmosphere between Lucy and her husband Ethan had become so strained and weighted down with grief that she had almost been relieved when he had left her for a paediatric nurse at the hospital he worked at. A petite, pretty blonde who looked a lot like Lucy before she had become grey and faded with grief.
    The guilt had been partially replaced by rage then; rage at the world, at Ethan and herself, and of course at Terry Prince. The adolescent boy, a shy, quiet loner they said, who had lured Jack away, beat him and then killed him with a brick to the head as if he were nothing more than a bug to be squashed underfoot.
    A psychotic break, they had said. Perhaps brought on by an absent father, an overly strict stepfather and a history of mental illness on the mother’s side. Lucy hated that, the way people would try to find a rational reason, a logical chain of events that had led Terry Prince to murder her baby in cold blood. She dreamed over and over of throttling him to death with her bare hands. But like the guilt the rage too had subsided, although neither feeling ever completely stopped gnawing at her, and a numb kind of acceptance had taken their place. She went about her daily life as if through a fog, buoyed up by a sense of surreality, only Ricky giving her a reason to get out of bed. She was both over-protective of him and somehow distant. Afraid to be too tactile, too close, as if by loving him too much she would unwittingly put him in danger.
    â€˜What were you thinking?’
    Danielle Wyatt dropped the paper onto the table as if it were a particularly smelly diaper, her fingers curling away from it even before she had let it go.
    Lucy had no time to defend herself before Ricky did it for her, glaring at his usually beloved grandmother.
    â€˜I think it’s awesome. It’s about time Mum stuck up for herself. Maybe now they’ll lock that piece of shit back up.’
    â€˜Stop swearing,’ both women said simultaneously, before Lucy straightened her back and looked her mother in the eye.
    â€˜It needs saying, Mum, and it needed saying now. Okay, I was angry, but don’t I have a right to be?’
    Danielle’s face softened. Even she had to admit to herself that it was better